The Third-Party Trap

After ratcheting up during the government shutdown this fall, tensions between the Republican establishment and many Tea Party supporters (or “wacko birds,” as Sen. John McCain has called them) seemed to hit a high point in mid-December: House Speaker John Boehner had harsh words for hardline conservative activist groups, and they declared in response that “the conservative movement has come under attack on Capitol Hill.”

The growing Republican “civil war,” as many have labeled it, might leave Republicans wondering just how much more pressure the party can take before it breaksin two. Recent Gallup polls show not only that 43 percent of Tea Party backers view the Republican Party negatively, but also that a remarkable 60 percent of Americans think a major new party is needed. A November NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll also found that more Americans (30 percent) would vote for a third-party congressional candidate than a Republican (28 percent). Now, talk-show hosts, pundits and the like are echoing with calls for third-party organizing.

The prospect of a serious third-party push within the conservative movement, if a bit far-fetched, certainly seems tempting to those disillusioned with the GOP establishment. But it also calls to mind a similar attempt in 1976, and its failure. Had that push succeeded, Ronald Reagan might never have become president—which is to say: Today’s GOP dissidents should take a look back at their history before any renegades attempt to break off.

In the past century, American third-party founders have usually been minor or radical figures. (Recall that former Alabama Gov. George Wallace ran for president in 1968 as the nominee of the American Independent Party, which drew on lingering segregationist beliefs in the South.) But an instructive exception was the effort in the 1970s by prominent activists—notably National Review publisher William Rusher, a major conservative spokesman—to replace the GOP with a new, more ideological party. Rusher and his supporters wanted the this new party to be more committed to reducing the size and scope of government, which had expanded under President Richard Nixon; to take more conservative social positions after a decade of social liberalism; and to take a harder-line approach to foreign policy in an era of détente with the Soviet Union and others, waning American global power and the Vietnam War debacle.

Former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan captured the right’s brewing disillusionment with the Republican Party in his 1975 book Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories. At the time, Buchanan argued, conservatism was the only one of the era’s new political movements—the rest were essentially on the left—that couldn’t claim major results at the policy level. Partly, he said, that was due to Republican officeholders’ insufficient passion for the cause or opposition to it. Both parties were “up to their elbows in this sordid business of bidding for votes with the tax dollars of the American people,” Buchanan wrote. Although he didn’t urge the creation of a third party, noting the difficulties of starting a successful one—including the natural human resistance to change—he spoke sympathetically of the possibility.

It was in this climate that a group of frustrated activists began working with Rusher on the early stages of third-party organizing in early 1975, with their eyes on the presidential election the next year. They included Rep. John Ashbrook of Ohio, American Conservative Union chairman M. Stanton Evans, Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and social-conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly. Their committee was authorized by a vote at the American Conservative Union’s second annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which served, then as now, as something of a movement convention for activists on the right.

In the 1976 presidential election, Reagan, the recent California governor, emerged as the best potential face for this conservative disenchantment. Not long before, in late 1974,Reagan had mused vaguely about changing the Republican Party’s “name or something” unless conservatives’ confidence in the GOP could be restored. Rusher, who saw Reagan as the perfect potential candidate for his still unrealized new third party, thought he might be able to persuade the former governor to take the plunge. A few on Reagan’s staff liked the idea of ditching the GOP, but others didn’t. One of his major fundraisers, the businessman Holmes Tuttle, told Reagan: “You’re a Republican, and you’re going to stay one.” Little more was heard from Reagan about a third party, and in a conversation between him and Rusher the following spring Reagan largely closed the door on the cause. He would of course go on to challenge incumbent President Gerald Ford in the Republican primary.

With the possibility of winning the presidency on a new-party basis virtually dead, Rusher and his comrades kept going for several reasons. For one thing, there was the theoretical chance that Reagan might change his mind and run as a third-party nominee after all. Even if he didn’t, there was also the prospect that if, as Rusher expected, Reagan were to lose the GOP nomination, his bitterly disappointed delegates at the 1976 convention would flee to the new third party. There was also the possibility that Reagan might benefit from conservative voters who disliked the Republicans. By spoiling President Ford’s reelection, Rusher’s new party could accelerate the decline of the GOP, which had lost badly in the 1974 midterms, and create an even more favorable environment for a major third ticket over the long term.

But despite Rusher’s efforts to keep the movement alive, Reagan’s rejection doomed the new party as conservative enthusiasm grew for his Republican primary campaign. Meanwhile, although Rusher had hoped for major defections to the new party by conservative incumbents and recently defeated ones too, few materialized. His attempts to coopt existing third parties also failed miserably.

It wasn’t just Reagan who ruined Rusher’s grand plan. National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr.—who would warn Rusher that his third-party concept was sounding “awfully close to the kooks”—told Rusher in early 1976 that his book, The Making of the New Majority Party, didn’t quite make the case that the existing Republican Party was obsolete.Reagan remained unconvinced for the same reason, also noting a second, more strategic concern: that a conservative third party would only siphon off Republican votes and help elect Democrats. The journalist Robert Novak, reviewing The Making of the New Majority Party in the National Review, also thought such a party would fall prey to further conservative infighting and get distracted by “pet causes” like abortion.

Buckley’s fears were realized when the far-right American Independent Party, which Rusher and his comrades tried to co-opt because of its pre-existing ballot status, ignored them and picked as its candidate Lester Maddox, a segregationist former Georgia governor, thus relinking the party with the 1968 Wallace candidacy and the unlamented cause of segregation. Rusher, his fellow third-party planner Richard Viguerie, the populist conservative fundraiser and activist who had remained committed to the third-party project, and others were left with no candidate of their own in November.

By the 1980s, when Reagan was ultimately elected president as a Republican, Rusher had changed his tone years later, calling for a united GOP as the most effective way to advance conservative values. “Above all else in politics,” he told one of us three decades after the third-party flop, “remember that it isn’t enough just to have a set of principles. You have to have people out there representing them, getting elected on the basis of them.”

Tea Party and libertarian insurgents should think hard about that. If conservatism is truly the legacy they want to represent, they can’t just focus on their own frustrations and political reputations, bandying about loose rhetoric claiming their own particular brand of conservatism as the only real one. The GOP might lack an intellectual leader as prominent as Buckley and a preeminent political leader like Reagan, but it’s clear that the current factionalized, twitterized shouting match will get us nowhere.

Take it from Rusher: It is “dangerous,” he wrote a few years ago, for the right to “engage in maneuvers that try to narrow the GOP’s appeal to militant conservatives only.” Buckley and a chastened Rusher would try to shepherd those wayward conservatives back into more orderly discourse—and a single Republican party.

Jonathan Riehl is a political communications consultant and instructor in communications studies.